Conservation Agriculture in crop-livestock systems (CLCA) in the drylands

• ongoing ICARDA project (2018 - 2022) financed by an IFAD grant of 2.5 Mio. USD

• implementation of conservation agriculture practices to increase water use efficiency, soil protection and income

• ICARDA expressed interest in using RS technologies for ongoing M&E of key indicators of the project

• in the future: modeling of impacts on water balance and biomass productivity on water basin scale

Conservation agriculture (CA)

adapted from FAO (2017)

• 180 Mio. ha (12.5%) of global cropland under CA practices in 2015 (Kassam et. al (2018))
• criticism was expressed about the impact of CA on smallholder farms (Giller et. al (2015))
• increase in yields is not observed globally
• in dry conditions yield increase is more pronounced
• depending on the implementation

Basic principles of RS

Source: Centre for Remote Imaging, Sensing & Processing

EM-Spectrum

Source: NASA

Solar radiation and atmospheric windows

Source: Centre for Remote Imaging, Sensing & Processing

Spectral response functions of Sentinel-2 A & B

Source: ESA

Spectral signatures of different crops

Source: USGS

Basic geographic data representations

Source: Saab (2003)

Sentinel-2 flight path animation by ESA

Source: ESA

Levels of resolution for RS data

• spectral resolution
• spatial resolution
• temporal resolution

Screenshot of the WaPOR portal

Source: FAO WaPOR

Relational diagram of data layers in WaPOR

Source: FAO (2020)

Scheme of ETLook model used by WaPOR

Source: FAO (2020)

Map of Bouhedma National Park and 50km buffer zone

Yearly and monthly sum of precipitation

Precipitation anomalies

Standardised Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI)

Productivity measures for the first and second season